If not too late, I’d really give ROCK another shot… maybe I got lucky with my USB ethernet but try to find a used Cisco Linksys USB 2.0 Ethernet Adapter (M300) on ebay or something… it’s just so simple and easy to use and update.
I’m just really doubting that ROCK would support hdmi audio output on my mini, given that its GeForce graphics card is not supported for HDMI audio by the Nouveau drivers built into Linux (it took me quite a long time to find this out!)
https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html
“10 HDMI Audio only works for NVA3/A5/A8 (GT21x) GPUs. Some pre-NVA3 setups have been reported, but it’s no thanks to nouveau.”
Your opinion of your aged Mac mini is inflated. It is a little old Core2 Duo, man. Nucleus is no absolute powerhouse. It is not designed to be. But fact check here, its processor runs circles around that in your Mac mini.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/976vs2879/Intel-Core2-Duo-P8800-vs-Intel-i3-7100U
AJ
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I don’t think I would perceive an SQ difference, but it’s an easy way to keep the Mini out of landfill and undeniably cheap! Well done on the install.
B
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Thanks all - will stick with it until it gives up on me then, and upgrade to something newer when it has finally died. Maybe there will even be an updated Nucleus by then, to give me another 10-15 years 
Fact-check well noted - and appreciated as well 
I just put xubuntu on my 2010 Mac Mini this weekend and it was a pain. Had to TTY into it and reload nvidia drivers or I just got a black screen. That work around was flawless, but took me hours of frustration to find. Did 22.04 just load up without all the Nvidia issues?
Would you like me to load ROCK onto my 2010 Mac Mini and see if it the HDMI out works for multichannel? It is a bit of a process and requires multiple Mac Minis, but if it would help, I can load it up and test it out.
So both Ubuntu 22.04 and 20.04 installed and worked fine, in terms of graphics, using the standard Nouveau drivers - however no support for HDMI audio (a show stopper for me). I tried to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers, which wasn’t possible without rolling back to 20.02 and ended in an ugly mess (errors during install and not possible to boot without black screen crashes so I ended up just reinstalling). Think I reached 8 or 10 fresh installs of different Ubuntu releases before giving up. I didn’t try 22.10 though as this came out after I gave up.
But using open core patcher to install Monterey - that worked first time and so far seems to be working perfectly, and with beautiful Multichannel 24 bit 192kHz audio output (which I believe the newer Minis no longer support)
So to answer your question - no thanks, I am 99% confident that ROCK won’t support HDMI audio on the GeForce 320M graphics card. See also this self-solved support post for more details on why. Happy to be corrected if you know better though!! Also super happy with the support received from the tinkering community 
https://community.roonlabs.com/t/no-audio-output-from-2010-mac-mini-hdmi/215976
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